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"The stream of Time, irresistible, ever moving, carries off and bears away all things that come to birth and plunges them into utter darkness, both deeds of no account and deeds which are mighty and worthy of commemoration. . .Nevertheless, the science of History is a great bulwark against the stream of Time; in a way it checks this irresistible flood, it holds in a tight grasp whatever it can seize floating on the surface and will not allow it to slip away into the depths of Oblivion. "
- Anna Comnena (1083-1153), The Alexiad
"I have taken all knowledge to be my province."
- Francis Bacon, 1592
What the French really want is for us to return to the status quo ante, where they worked to undercut America at every turn but "for the sake of good relations" we politely took no notice of it and pretended everything was copacetic. I predicted in several posts that they would try to lull us back into somnolence while continuing to pursue these hostile policies (such as warning the countries of Eastern Europe that they'll have to choose EUrope and not side with America again). I just didn't know they'd be so brazen about it (for some reason, the French always surprise me in how brazen they're willing to be in these things).
Your word for today is "invidious". Definition: the French diplomatic letter.
Someday they will get their way, though. Because some day someone will return to the White House who by and large agrees with the premises of the French governing class.
he could only imagine direct elections for the president of the Council - the body made up of governments of member states - in the distant future.
"Perhaps in 50 years," he said.
Isn't that the kind of reassuring remark one would expect from a Communist apparatchik?
"Once we've done more to dissolve all your identities and mold you into the kind of population we need, we'll let you pull a lever for one of any number of undistingishable balding EUrocrat functionaries." (See the picture accompanying the BBC article).
Now I actually agree that it's impossible for the EU as constituted to be a democratic federal state. But where d'Estaing and his brethren in Brussels plan on pushing forward, regardless, and where they put the fault for this on the people of EUrope (who simply aren't ready to elect the people who will rule them in this Brave New EUrope), I put the onus on those who are constructing these institutions and pursuing integration and "harmonization" in this manner, with the preference for hidden-hand rulership styles and the methods of an Impersonal Bureaucracy (which see). My point is that the EU that is a flawed instrument (lacking in accountability and transparency, lacking in the rule of law properly understood, and pursuing a misguided vision, also for the reasons discussed here), while to the EU's visionaries, it's the people of EUrope that are flawed and in need of modification before they can be ready for the EU (in the sense of "being allowed" to elect those who will govern it - and them).
In the long history of such things, it never turns out that the people who say such things decide the population is "ready" to be entrusted with the election of their rulers. The "right time" just never arrives. There are always reasons (rationalizations) why it should be put off for a few more years, decades, whatever: There are still "problems to be overcome" before everything is just so you see. I mean, you wouldn't want it to turn out like in America, would you people? So it's wiser to wait, and let our vision guide you until the proper conditions are created, you see? Then we'll grant you the privilege of voting for these offices.
So I didn't blog on the initial attack. There didn't seem to be much point until seeing what the House of Saud's reaction would be.
It's been a bit mixed, to be sure. But there are hopeful - or at least interesting - signs. Saudi media, including those directed by the government, are reacting with at least some self-examination, which is an improvement on the usual white-wash of these things. At least now there's a public debate over it (and from many, an acknowledgement that the Sept. 11th attackers were largely of Saudi origin - puncturing the previous propagandistic conspiracy theories).
Also this seems to signify a break in the "tacit agreement" between the House of Saud and al-Queda: the mutual deal whereby al-Queda would, in essence, get some support (money, officials looking the other way, and the like) has apparently been terminated - seemingly mutually.
The larger quandary for the House of Saud is akin to that of the Ayatollah's of Iran in the sense that either they will willingly reform and move to open their society or have it forced on them (probably by their own people, and with regards to the Saudis, they won't have America watching their back as much anymore - the toppling of Saddam in Iraq has both removed the largest external threat to Saudi control of Arabia and to a great degree freed America from the "dependency cycle" with the Saudis). The more perceptive members of the extensive Saud Familia seem to realize this. Others will no doubt have to be broomed.
Looks like that BBC report I linked to yesterday was not accurate. Or at least there's a rift in the British government over whether to try and push ahead now or not.
Blair wants to try to shoehorn Britain into the Euro. The EU still remains Blair's blind spot.
I'll note one thing Sullivan didn't: all these folks have simply slipped down the Memory Hole the fact that in '96 the Left of the Democratic Party was fairly disillusioned with Clinton. They hadn't ever liked any of that "New Democrat", DLC stuff, whether sincerely expressed or not; in '92 they were desperate enough to return to power that they sucked it up, but by '96 they were bitter and enraged over such things as Welfare Reform and Clinton's agreeing to hold the line on some spending programs that they were on the verge of mutiny, gripping and muttering about running someone against him or defecting. In the end they held ranks for the sake of The Cause (the reason was, as Blumenthal puts it in another context "the larger political interest"), but were not pleased with the Clinton. It took the Lewinski Saga for them to re-embrace Clinton and declare him the "First Black President" et al, and sanctify him - he had achieved full "Victim Status", and that matters more than niggling policy differences, which they had come to realize he wasn't sincere on anyhow - he was really "with them" anyhow. The episode reminded them of why they had embraced him in the first place, despite apparent policy differences. The Newspeak term used for that reason during the '92 campaign was "electability". But it boiled down to this:
Why? Because for the first time, Sid [and he was far, far from alone in this] smelled power—and the kind of amoral tenacity he respected.
When reminded of this Nietzschean will to power that was Clinton's true spirit, and what they regarded as the be-all-and-end-all (one has to remember that this was the heyday of this sort of person reducing everything to narratives of power - revealing, mainly, their own obsessions with power as an end in and of itself), all their past misgivings over him were (literally and completely) forgotten ("Clinton is beloved of the Left. Clinton has always been beloved of the Left").
Now, Blumenthal's fanatical faith never really wavered. But I'm sure that this fact doesn't appear in his book in any significant way. It "Unhappened".
It's all there, including the desperate unfulfilled longing for a One Party State, something shared by too many of Blumenthal's ideological kindred spirits.
While Germany is realizing they face recession, America's main economic problem may be deflation, as I've warned before. Rising energy prices have tended to mask this somewhat (as has the acknowledged but often unremembered fact that the CPI tends to overstate inflation and for political reasons - the fact that many programs have their budget increases determined by the CPI and thus have constituencies for insuring the CPI continues to overstate it so their budgets will go up more), but now they're going back towards normal levels and it's readily apparent:
Wholesale prices in the US fell in April at the fastest pace on record while industrial output fell for the second consecutive month, according to official figures released on Thursday. The reports appeared likely to enflame debate about the risks of deflation and economic slowdown.
In a morning report, the Labor Department said its producer price index fell 1.9 per cent, more than expected. The report was significantly influenced by recent declines in oil prices, but even after excluding food and energy, the decline was the biggest in almost a decade. Excluding food and energy prices, it was down 0.9 per cent, the biggest drop since August 1993.
That and the out-of-control current accounts (or "trade") deficit is why the Fed is increasing the money supply and interest rates are more likely to go down again before they go up.
In better news, jobless claims were down for the second week in a row.
Margret Thatcher gave a significant speech in New York yesterday. Key point:
"Nowadays socialism is more often dressed up as environmentalism, feminism, or international concern for human rights. All sound good in the abstract.
“But scratch the surface and you will as likely as not discover anti-capitalism, patronising and distorting quotas, and intrusions upon the sovereignty and democracy of nations.”
Lady Thatcher warned that America and Britain faced “a pervasive culture of anti-Westernism" that needed to be challenged. "There are too many people who imagine that there is something sophisticated about always believing the best of those who hate your country, and the worst of those who defend it."
Some people will try to cow you into not challenging it, try to divert your attention. They may mean well and they tend to believe that conventional Conservatives are at least as bad as those on the Left who admire or rationalize the behavior totalitarian despots. A sort of perverse equivalence is consciously or unconsciously the underlaying belief of these people, a romantic illusion of the type Armed Liberal writes of. They will try to tell you that other things should be the focus of your priorities (their concerns, for example). Their efforts will be, in effect, to convince you to ignore those who are, lets put it bluntly, hostile to our society and civilization and nihilistic in their intent. These well-meaning people will want you to adopt their phantasmagorical self-deception that this isn't worth worrying about (not compared to the looming menace of tax cuts, at least). The effect of this, if not the intent, will be to let the forces of Cultural Marxism and other varieties of Leftist decay continue to advance unchecked.
Well meaning people will go to great lengths to try and convince you to share their delusion or at least convince you to "please write about something else. Here are some topics you could write about instead." Why? Because confronting these issues challenges their illusions, and that might cause their entire romanticized view of the Left as a whole to crumble. So please, write about something else. . .
These pleas should be ignored; these forces need to be challenged as often as possible. Doing so will defeat them, because their vision cannot withstand scrutiny. It's only when it's left largely unquestioned that it prospers. Do not be dissuaded or deterred by the siren-song of the well-meaning but self-deluded voices of anti-anti-Cultural Marxism. In fact, paradoxically, the more effort they spend trying to convince you not to worry about these things, the more you should know you're on the right track, making sound points, and should continue.
One of the hackneyed canards that the e-mailer I referred to this morning tossed out was that I was making too much of a "tiny minority" on the Left.
But of course, as Raymond Babbitt said while counting cards in Las Vegas, "there are lots and lots of them". I see the sorts of people Lileks describes in the first part of that post. I see them almost every day - their t-shirts or their bumper-sticker wisdom or their lawns festooned with signs (similarly inscribed with fortune-cookie slogans). My mother, bless her soul, who was a Democrat until just recently (she's a lifelong Democrat and stayed one for a couple years after I had moved on), almost all her friends (Democrats and Liberals-if-not-Leftists all) are like the people described here, and have screamed at her, appalling tirades of venom whenever political issues come up. I read their articles, listen to their snippy and snide little remarks on air (radio, TV - I'm a big C-SPAN junky, for one), and overhear (without trying) their conversations at work or at the library or when waiting in the checkout line at the store or movie theater or in a restaurant. I went to school with these people, and I work with them (last spring one of the people who works for the same business I do took an almost month-long "extended studies travel class" to go bask in the wonderment that is Castro's Cuba - they have free health care, you know, and any problems are, of course, the result of U.S. policy, naturally - and clearly prefers Castroite despotism to American Republicans, and most of the folks hung on his every word, nodding happily; they didn't go, but they didn't disagree with him, either).
I know the type. They were too common when I was a Dem (as I've mentioned in previous posts). But who am I to believe? E-mailers trying to convince me I'm getting worked up over nothing? Or my lyin eyes and ears?
Next person who tries to tell me I don't know what I'm talking about better do more than blow smoke up my fundament. They better not think I'm a simpleton unaware of the world around me who can be spun by such bovine fecal matter.
They may be a minority among Liberals (I said they were in my posts on the subject), but they're not "tiny", and they're not insignificant. They set the tone on the Left and among Liberals, and it's harder to find ones who don't spew venom than it is to find reasonable ones (but then, when you do, all most of the reasonable ones want to do is try to tell you that you should bury your head in the sand on this subject, as they have; they'd prefer to pretend the problem doesn't exist, and try to convince you to do the same for the peace of their mind).
"Can There Be a Decent Left?" The question's still open - but the answer that is starting to form is "probably not".
Remember the other day when I wrote that Senate Republicans were bluffing and their threat to take tough action to end the filibuster of judicial nominations?
Well, of they're already wavering on the idea. They're as predictable as a metronome on these things and will certainly cave.
Update: Norman Ornstein cautions against monkeying with the rules, which is fine. I respect Orenstein greatly. But "extended debate" is extended debate - not simple refusal to hold a vote. If they wanna talk, let 'em talk. Ornstein seems to agree, at least with respect to some issues:
For significant and highly charged issues — including judicial nominations — the traditional 24-hour filibuster process still should apply.
24/7. The gradual evolution of the filibuster from "I'm going to talk this issue to death" to "we're just going to oppose voting on it, but if you try to make us talk like in the old days, that's unacceptable" was a bad move, opening the door to abuse - which is what we have now.
And that was, along with this very recent filibustering of judicial nominees, the real change in Senate rules and traditions.
But as I said in the original post, it's a waste to debate whether the rules should be changed or not, because the Republicans are going to fade on this anyhow. Ornstein's article is fine, but it's rather pointless to warn Frist not to do something he isn't going to do anyhow.
Similarly, he can recommend they go to the 24 hour filibuster for highly charged issues, and folks like me can gripe about the fact that they don't all we want, but it's a waste of time. They're too lazy to bother pushing for something hard like that.
Sorry about the lack of posting this morning. I just got done writing a long reply to a reader who thinks it's unseemly to raise certain issues and tried in a passive-aggressive fashion to persuade me that I should have other priorities and not mention these things (that are unsettling to his side of the political spectrum).
It took awhile to write a mail explaining why I had the priorities I did instead of the priorities he wanted me to have, since it required distinguishing between issues he wanted me to raise and the ones I have focused on lately.
I also encouraged him to start his own blog, where he can write as much as he'd like about the topics that he thinks deserve greater attention than I've chosen to give them.
Ramsey Clark, former Attorney General under President Johnson, claims "U.S. threatens humanity's destiny", which I'm sure it does - as Clark's friends down at World Worker's Party Headquarters have no doubt told him, humanity's destiny is global socialism under the wise guiding hands of Stalinist despots.
Note that Clark comes out against "demonizing" butchers; his policy is like that of Chomksy - demonization is to be directed exclusively for America and Americans. Certainly not at enlightened leaders like Castro, Kim Jong Il, and Saddam Hussein, who are guiding their people towards humanity's destiny rather than threatening it.
Of course, what most upsets Clark is the possibility that free market republics such as the United States are humanity's destiny, not Socialist despotism. That's the thought which keeps him up at night.
The most pathetic thing? I'm sure his views were given a more sympathetic hearing by the members of the National Press Club than, say, those of the current Attorney General would be.
Yah, I used that word deliberately. There are several pernicious things about the attitudes on display in this but I'm going to restrict my focus to one and only one:
Oreo cookies should be banned from sale to children in California, according to a lawsuit filed by a San Francisco attorney who claims that trans fat -- the stuff that makes the chocolate cookies crisp and their filling creamy -- is so dangerous children shouldn't eat it.
Increasingly, laws are made not by petitioning the legislature to draft a bill to do so, but by "a unique approach"es to applying regulations expansively, done primarily through the use of courts-as-legislative-bodies (circumventing the legislative process), as a means of imposing ones preferences on others by judicial fiat (a public education campaign to try and persuade people to not eat Oreo cookies would be long, difficult, and perhaps most importantly not as potentially lucrative for tort lawyers, who, after all, need to fill their coffers so they can slip money to employees for the purpose of funding John Edwards' Presidential Campaign, the election of whom is so vitally important to the continuation of this process).
If one talks about people who are circumventing the democratic legislative process but aim at using the instruments of state power to coercively impose their beliefs on others, well, one should look to the Left to see where that is now simply assumed to be acceptable, even laudable. The SF Gate article doesn't even raise a questioning eybrow regarding these "innovative" tactics engaged in by a Lawyer presented as the Champion of the Public Good.
The BBC reports on a study that claims to show that the incomes of poor Blacks have declined by almost a fifth since 1995, while the income of White South Africans has continued to increase.
The tendency by some may be to say that this is the result of continued "institutional racism" in the mostly White-run businesses of South Africa. But it is properly identified as the consequence of the government's bad economic policies:
"The bottom two-thirds of black people in South Africa have seen a substantial decline in their incomes as linked to inflation," Mr de Swardt said.
Folks might ask "ok, if it's the result of inflation, then why hasn't that inflation affected the income of Whites?" Well, contrary to the belief of some, the effects of inflation always land most heavily on people with low incomes. People with higher incomes have greater means of insulating themselves (access to foreign currency markets, for one thing) from the effects of inflation.
Inflation is the result of bad monetary policy, the government printing too much money. South Africa's government needs to get that under control, or another consequence of this will be increasing frictions between Black and White South Africans.
A good article on his tempered optimism regarding post-Saddam Iraq and reconstruction efforts:
The trick for the United States, he suggests, will be to return Iraq's politics to its people, even as America maintains a continuing, stabilizing military presence. "I think it's possible to withdraw relatively rapidly from Iraqi political life and day-to-day decisions -- but to remain there as the essential security force."
"We want to convey that we'll be there, for emergency use, for a long time,"
Sounds like the type of balance to try and strike. This also sounds right:
If this has been Wolfowitz's war in terms of its strategic goals, then it's clearly far from over. To judge by his comments, the Pentagon's leading planner isn't thinking about future conflicts against adversaries such as Syria and Iran but about making sure that America has truly won this war in Iraq.
Of course, to the usual suspects, Wolfowitz will always be treated as a sort of "Doctor Strangelove" type. But at least David Ignatius got past that view and found out what the man really thinks.
It would be very easy for me to have Schadenfreude over the decline of Ted Turner's fortune, especially considering the degree to which he's had foot-in-mouth disease and his political views (the Soviet Union not being so bad compared to the U.S., etc), and the degree to which he's trying to put a smiling face on business disaster (the sale of his company to AOL-Time-Warner).
But I don't. Look, companies owned by the dude who built them tend to be the best (as companies, at least - I'm not talking as news organizations, etc). If I had his ear when he was considering the sale, I'd have told him it could only end in disaster. That no matter what the reasons for it (and those could mostly have been covered by entering into agreements that stopped short of merging), that it would ultimately redound to the detriment, not the benefit, of everything he had built in the business world (I didn't know it would come so quickly).
For all his faults, and all the faults of such Turner organs as CNN, he had built something of real value. That something hasn't "ceased to exist", to be true, but none of it will ever be the same - ever be as dynamic, as creative, as innovative, as long-sighted - as when Turner himself ran it.
What is it with you people? There's a perfectly good movie called The Italian Job, staring Michael Caine (you may have heard of him). Why remake it? There's absolutely no point.
I can see remaking a movie where someone took a perfectly good idea and produced crap (recycle the idea in a film that's actually good), but in this day and age (in any day and age, really), there's no reason to try and outdo a classic. I mean, what's next? "The Godfather" (2004 version, starring George Clooney as Michael Corleone and Cedric the Entertainer as Don Vito)? "The Man Who Would Be King" (2005 version, starring Chris Rock and Cameron Diaz as Danny and Peachy, script "updated" to make unsubtle pointed remarks about Bush's foreign policy in Afghanistan, natch)? "Gone With the Wind" (2006 version, starring Jennifer Lopez and Vin Diesel as Scarlett and Rhett).
Then there's "Sinbad". At this point I'm thinking I'll join the news monster!
I'm going to go throw a Calvin-like fit now. Wait, I'm already doing that.
"I am worried about trite anti-Americanism in this country," he told the programme.
"I think that people get obsessed about the United States because of its immense wealth and power. I think it's just become fashionable, this kind of anti-Americanism, and it's a convenient parody.
"If you look at the United States of course there are things that we would not necessarily approve of, but if you look at the US's contribution to where we are today, it has been immense and for the good.
"First of all they did literally save Europe from the most terrible tyranny in the Second World War but in addition if you look at IT, you look at biotech, the things that these days keep us going, make our lives happier and healthier, it's to America that we owe a huge amount.
"People need to remember that."
Here's someone else speaking out on a particularly virulent and odious strain of anti-Americanism.
Hey, I'm not an apologist for the New York Times, and I'm not trying to minimize the Blair Fiasco. But the Times calling this the "lowest point" in their history and Andrew Sullivan following suit seems a bit much. Not because this is nothing, but because off the top of my head, I can think of a much worse episode in Times history.
if on a scale of -10 to -1, the Walter Duranty Low is a -10, then this Blair thing rates a -8 at best (worst?). Perhaps for the Times, covering up for Stalin isn't so bad (after all, they got a Pulitzer for it, right? and after all, the Soviets meant well and the Times has never been in the business of "giving ammunition to Red-Baiters", especially when it's true), but I expect more from others.
Update: Here's a CBC transcript of a commentary on Duranty. I gotta love this line, referring to Duranty:
What he was really was Stalin's apologist, a libertine prepared to prostitute accuracy for access.
What? A news organization "prepared to prostitute accuracy for access?" The tradition continues (in Iraq, the Palestinian Territories, and who knows where else?)
Now, I didn't make an issue of this when Sen. Byrd made an appearance in uniform in the movie Gods and Generals - after all, it was pretty small beer, I thought. By the way, I'm one of the people who was disappointed by the movie (having gone to it); as a movie, it was a failure.
Well, if Senator Byrd wants it, he gets it (said in my best Strother Martin voice). Byrd himself appeared rather flamboyantly attired in general's regalia. Here's a picture (it lasts longer):
Note that Senator Byrd chose to appear as a Confederate general. What's the big deal? Well, West Virginia, the state he represents, was a Union state. So he doesn't have the argument (which I tend to respect) that this is part of his State's historical heritage. His State's historical heritage was not Confederate.
Now, since this whole thing revolves around a petty ad homenem initiated by Byrd and other Democrats, I could find it fair to make a quip that perhaps Byrd went with the uniform of a Confederate general because the uniform of his personal legacy (white sheets and hoods) weren't period-appropriate to the movie. But I'll avoid such pettiness, and leave that kind of thing to the Democrats. I could never hope to compete with them in that area. I will point out that Byrd's invocation of Lincoln after choosing, for no obvious reason that's worthy of mention, to portray a Confederate, is. . .interesting. I would have thought that Nathan Bedford Forrest was closer to his heart.
